


A Happy Ending

by yuletide_archivist



Category: The Brothers Grimm (2005)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-18
Updated: 2007-12-18
Packaged: 2018-01-25 08:24:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1641305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"And they all lived happily ever after.  Well, maybe not."  Or maybe yes, eventually.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Happy Ending

**Author's Note:**

> An attempt was made to tie the real lives of the Brothers Grimm to the lives of the Brothers Grimm in the movie. Really, it's fascinating to think of Will and Jake as students of linguistics.
> 
> Written for Faye

 

 

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Angelika tore strips of linen from her gray twelfth princess dress, lining them up on the bench. Lily, the middle sister, took them and dumped them into the pot of boiling water. Charlotte stirred them, then pulled them out again with a spoon. As they dried, Jake took them and bound Will's still-bleeding hands.

They were bleeding again because Jake and Angelika had taken two hours to pull the slivers of glass from his palms. Will had borne the procedure in silence, hissing once or twice, but that was it.

"...and Sascha was attacked by a mud creature from the well," Angelika continued, her voice low and measured. Her sisters had stopped murmuring long ago; the time they'd spent under the Queen's spell seemed longer the more they heard, even though the bulk of Angelika's story was taking place over only the last few days. Jake wrapped another bit of cloth around Will's hand and dreaded the moment when Angelika turned the story to him. Maybe Will would take the chance to speak.

"Wait," Cavaldi had said, "I know this story, from my childhood."

But which story?

{}{}{}

"I've heard that one," Dorothea said, her eyes focusing on the far away again. Jake snatched up his notebook and pen. "Little Red-Cap, or so I heard it called. That, or Little Red Riding Hood."

"A new career," Will reminded him when Dorothea had gone, another day of story-telling at its end. Jake put his pen down and massaged his hand; it would soon be a claw. "I was thinking something like--"

"She told me this one two weeks ago," Jake interrupted, flipping the book back to that long-ago, smudged date. "Look, it will be exactly the same, every word--"

"And you'll tell me, one day, why that matters?" Will sighed and settled back in the chair. The sitting room in the inn had grown dark during the long afternoon of story-telling.

"I tell you every time you ask." Jake lit a lamp and almost rubbed his eyes, before remembering that there was ink all over his hands. "There's something in the stories themselves, something that sticks in people's minds and in the world, and it--it lives in the magic, Will, or it lives off of it, and--"

"I'll write to Angelika again, tell her you're overdoing it," Will threatened, dropping a most effective dam into Jake's stream of thought. "Come on, there must be something worth eating in this town."

{}{}{}

He wasn't overdoing it. He almost had it, in fact, and then he'd be done and he could settle into something a little less time- and thought-consuming, and maybe he'd stay a while in Marbaden, and either win Angelika's heart or get over her, so Will could stop holding back and using her as a cattle-prod and Angelika would stop letting him. Sometimes true love isn't enough, after all. Right? Jake stopped on his twenty-third circuit of a well-worn path between the bed and the window and looked out into night. And he'd be able to sleep again, too.

He'd tracked down bits and pieces of stories, finding their adventure with the Mirror Queen to be something like a bubbling cauldron of tales. But all of the stories ended in one happy ending or another, and unless Cavaldi was the true hero of the story and his plump new wife the secret princess, there had been a distinct lack of the traditional happy ending. Not to mention, the villain had yet to die.

The full moon had risen. Jake dug the small jewelry box out from under his mattress (and wasn't it funny, so funny, that Will believed it was a present for Angelika that lay hidden inside) and opened it in the clear white light. The Queen's hard brown gaze met his; she was standing far from the sliver this time, trying to get a fuller view.

"You haven't spoken to me in ages, Jacob," she accused, her voice still light and lilting.

"There was a storm during the last full moon."

Her eyes flashed. "You could talk to me in between."

"I would prefer to talk to you when you aren't rotting behind the glass," Jake snapped. Loathing rose up in his throat like bile and he swallowed against it, wincing. He remembered finding her beautiful, just the way she looked now, youthful skin and long dark hair... but it was like a dream. He couldn't imagine finding her lovely now.

But he preferred her moonlight illusion of beauty to the corpse that gaped at him in any other light.

"It doesn't matter." She was looking away now, a smirk curving gently over her face. "I have other views."

She was bluffing. Jake's blood ran cold. "You're bluffing."

"You believe that."

And he wanted to smash that last bit of mirror, but if there were pieces still around, at least Jake had the largest one. At least he had some hold over the Queen, that if there were other pieces to peer out of, she was still in this one when he opened the box.

"I'm going to find a way to kill you," he told her. and the Queen laughed.

"Oh, Jacob," she said dreamily, "You say that every time."

{}{}{}

_"Wait. I know this story, from my childhood."_

"Change the wording around a little, and you can publish this," Will said, flipping through Jake's finished notebook with barely contained glee. "You know about von Arnim and Brentano! There is a real, rising interest in German folklore. This could be our ticket, Jake!"

"I thought you were interested in the language, in forging a--how did you put it?" Jake smirked, remembering his brother's line down at the pub the other night. "Forging a new German identity through a study of language. Helena believed that, did she?"

"Oh, she did." Will shined his fingernails on his shirt. "For the night, anyway. I'm serious, Jake. Put your name on this, get it out into the world, and you could be famous!"

"I don't want to be famous," he muttered, and hunched over the unfinished notebook--the one that tracked the bits and pieces of stories through Angelika's story, as he thought of it now. Angelika's story, and not the story of the Brothers Grimm. He thought more clearly if he divorced himself from the action.

"Then, brother mine, I will bear that burden in your place," Will said, and stole Jake's pen over his protests. "Just to sign it, Wilhelm Grimm--"

"No one who knows you will believe you wrote it. Angelika will expose you." Will's arm on his shoulder felt comfortably solid. Jake had been feeling more haunted than usual as of late.

"We'll do it this way, then." Will crossed out his own name, and then wrote with a flourish: the Brothers Grimm. Jake considered it, bold and black on the cover.

"It'll do," he said, and ducked away before Will could hit him.

{}{}{}

"Do you have any idea how much work goes into magic?" the Queen asked, and yawned delicately, turning her face away. Jake sat on the windowsill, best to catch the light, and ignored the cold wind to his back.

Another one of Will's academic contacts had set them up there, in a castle, for the duration of their stay in France. Jake didn't much like France (he saw too many men that recalled Delatombe and his toady), but he wanted to track down a few stories of which Dorothea had known only bits and pieces. Besides, as long as Will's story of studying German and using this study to promote a Germanic identity was holding up, why not benefit from it?

"It was easier after the first girl." The Queen's eyes were hooded whenever she remembered Angelika's story--Angelika's, and not her own, Jake would make sure the Mirror Queen was always second to Angelika. It was a petty revenge, but he would take what he could get.

"So, you received her youth and energy immediately?" He was taking notes with his left hand. The Queen insisted he hold her mirror with his right or she wouldn't speak. It was her little attempt to make Jake's writing more difficult. He didn't tell her how skilled he'd become in using his left.

"It was more than that, silly Jacob. I was taking energy from more than a few silly girls." Something caught her eye and she turned away from him; Jake was staring at her ear. She was doing that more often lately. Jake didn't want to believe that she did have another mirror piece out there, another window into the world. It must be another battle tactic. He would believe that until other evidence presented itself, and from a source other than the Queen.

"So magic takes a lot of work, but it gets easier when you can, um, drain other girls and other... things?" He pushed his glasses up his nose and froze when the Queen's accusing gaze found the pen in his left hand.

"We will talk another time, then, Jacob," she said coldly, and turned her back to him. It didn't matter now if he pleaded--something he would never do, anyway; not to her. She was done speaking. He would have to check up on her during the next full moon, and if she wasn't starved for attention then, well.

Will would never go. Jake would never be able to bring himself to ask. But maybe Angelika would help him look for the last slivers of the Mirror Queen.

_"Wait. I know this story..."_

{}{}{}

"Pack up your things."

Jake looked up from his notebook ("the Twelve Princesses?" Coincidence, or did it actually fit?) and met Will's stony gaze. "Have we overstayed our welcome?"

A slight twitch of the eyebrow, which meant Will was reining in an automatic retort. He hadn't gotten them in trouble, then. "We have a previous obligation."

"What do you mean?"

Will threw a bag on the bed and started to go through the wardrobe, pulling out clothes and tossing those with less wear and tear near the bag. "We're not paupers, Jake. Get rid of the shirts that are more hole than cloth."

"What's our previous obligation?" Jake insisted. He hadn't been able to tell whether Will's somber gaze was serious or not. Will was getting to be quite a good actor.

"Why, Jake, did you forget?" Will turned around, a look of heartbreaking disappointment on his face. "It's almost little Lily's birthday. She would be so disappointed if we missed it."

Lily, the elder of Angelika's two little sisters. Jake groaned and hid his face. "Don't you dare tell her."

"That you forgot? That would make her cry, and I hate to make little girls cry." Will tossed another shirt onto the bed and then made himself busy shoving them into the bag. "I reserve the right to tell her if we're late, however."

"Wait, wait a moment." Jake pulled off his smeared glasses and peered at Will. "She never told me her birthday. I would have remembered. Angelika hasn't told us her birthday, either."

"I assure you, her birthday is in a week and a half, and you haven't found a present," Will said loftily. He was looking down at the bag, though. Suspicion coiled in Jake's gut.

"So you got a letter from Angelika, who wanted to give you a reason to drag me back to Marbaden."

"I have to drag you?" Will looked honestly surprised, but then again, he was getting better at the acting gig. "I thought you liked the girls. And more than liked their older sister, if true love's kiss was anything to go by."

But Jake wasn't going to be thrown off. "Have you been telling Angelika things? Again?"

"Things?" Will's look of confused scorn, on the other hand, had not been practiced enough to look anything like genuine.

"You've been writing her, telling her that I'm not eating or sleeping or some rot like that again. I know you," Jake insisted when Will started to argue. "I know you, I know how you act, and I know how you like to use Angelika and the girls as a, a bribe--"

The bag hit him in the chest and Jake stopped, a little stunned.

"Nevertheless," Will said, as he headed out the door. "You don't want to miss Lily's birthday."

Jake set his jaw, but opened the bag to stuff his book inside.

{}{}{}

"You don't look well, though," Angelika said with her usual disregard for courtesy, even as she handed him a glass of wine. "Have you been eating?"

"Please." Jake took a sip of the wine and grimaced at the too-sweet taste. "It's just my work. I almost have it, though."

"The story? You're almost finished?" Angelika looked impressed. Jake hated to correct her, but did anyway, because she'd ask to look at it if he didn't.

"No, you see, the story..." How to phrase it; that was the trouble. "It's raised some questions."

"Questions." And now she was making that face, the just-before-laughing face, and Jake looked away before the bitterness could return. "For example?"

"Do you realize how many folktales there are in your story?" Jake asked. He saw her blink, looking surprised, and realized it was because he had called it her story. He shook it off and continued. "Sleeping Beauty, for one. Shades of Little Red Riding Hood. Hansel and Gretel. Snow White! Rapun--"

Angelika caught his hands, laughing. "Jake! Why does it matter?"

Jake snatched his hands away, aware of Will looking over at them from the fireplace, where he had been trapped by Cavaldi and his newest instrument of torture: long, incredibly detailed stories of his everyday life in Marbaden. "It's just. What does it mean? Why were there so many stories just, just swirling around this one? What gave the Queen so much power that she could direct all of them, all at once?"

Angelika stopped laughing, but there was still a smile curving hiding just behind her eyes. "Why do you think she directed them?"

"If she didn't, then who did?"

"Who directed the stories you and Will used to peddle around the countryside?" Angelika raised an eyebrow. She enjoyed the stories of the Brothers Grimm in their early days. Lotte, the youngest sister, had taken them to heart so far as to rig up flying rabbit skeletons to scare Lily.

Jake raised an eyebrow right back at her. "Will and I, of course--"

Angelika put her finger on Jake's lips, and he stopped speaking immediately. "So you and Will single-handedly created stories of witches and trolls and haunted mills, and told each person what they had seen, and spread enough lie and rumor to make people believe that monsters truly walked the earth?"

Angelika was beautiful, but more than that, she had a beautiful, brilliant mind. Jake stared at her, feeling like his brain had just been set ablaze--but in the best of ways. "You mean--what you're saying is that the Queen, she didn't create the stories, she didn't direct them, she just, just used them, drawing on them, on what people believed--oh, Angelika, you're brilliant!"

And forgetting his brother, forgetting himself, Jake kissed her, hard, and then ran off to find his book to capture his thoughts before they got away from him.

{}{}{}

"Wait. I remember this story, from my childhood," Jake said to the clear night air. Then he was back at the inn, skipping the steps in his hurry, waving a greeting to the innkeeper on his way.

Stories! The Queen didn't only feed on the girls, no; she needed that power to make her young. What other power could she use, stuck up there in that tower? Why, make the villagers minds the wellspring of their trouble!

"You used their stories against them," Jake muttered, digging out the book and pen and knocking them to the floor in his search for matches to light the lamp. There were no matches, but the clear light of the moon was bright enough to write by.

Jake wrote down snatches of thought, tracking and trapping thoughts and half-thoughts like a hunter, like an animal searching for prey. The answer. What the stories meant, what Will meant when he told Jake to end the story; the answer to that final and terrible question how does one kill an evil mirror Queen?

In his haste, Jake lost his pen again and cursed, following it along the floor to the bed. And there he sat still, eyeing the mattress.

After a long moment, he dug out the jewelry box. Opening it in a sliver of moonlight, he saw what he had long feared to see: nothing.

The Queen was gone.

"Are you mad?"

Jake cried out and dropped the box, the shard flying out and sticking on his trouser leg. Will strode into the room, a look of amusement fighting with intrenched irritation in his face, and both expressions faded when he caught sight of what Jake had dropped.

"Will," Jake said, and obligingly shut his mouth when Will raised his hand. He was staring at the shard. There was no way, no way at all, that he didn't recognize it for what it was.

"She's still around, is she?" he finally said, after an eternity.

Jake knelt then and carefully plucked the sliver from the fabric, and restored it to the jewelry box. "She was. She isn't in here anymore, though."

When he had shut the box, Will took it from him. Jake didn't have the nerve to resist him. The war on his brother's features was between screaming at Jake or throwing the box out the window.

He did neither. Instead, he sat down heavily on the bed. "Jake."

"I went back to the tower to take notes for the story, and I saw her," Jake said, the words rushing out like a river breaking a dam. He felt light-headed. "She started cursing at me. Screaming. I didn't know how much power she had left, but it must have been a bit, Will, she was still alive, even after all that."

"It wasn't the end of the story?" Will asked, still looking down at the box.

"Which story?" Jake demanded, the frustration of a year twisting inside him. "Which one did she belong to? The Frog Prince? Rapunzel? I can tell you how those ended but I don't know this story! I don't know how to make it end!"

"Jake! Jake!" Will caught his shoulders and shook him, hard, then pulled him close into a strong hug. "Jake, you moron, you utter imbecile. You stupid... you stupid twit!"

He was laughing by the end of it, holding Jake close, and Jake started to laugh a little, too. He felt the last holds of hysteria easing.

"You should have told me," Will murmured. "So you were interrogating the Queen, trying to find out from her how to kill her. Twit."

"If anyone knew, she would know." Jake tried to defend his reasoning. "She might have let it slip, accidentally, as it were."

"And after all that, you get the answer from Angelika, anyway." Will drew back and then smacked Jake lightly on the skull. "Twit. I understand why you ran off like that, and yet I don't understand why you ran off like that. Good lord; she's been waiting ages for you to find some courage."

"What?" Another tunnel of thought loomed up and Jake could only stare at Will blankly, willing himself not to let go of the story just yet, and the way to defeat an evil queen. But... she was waiting? "Will--"

"Tomorrow," Will said, and managed a small smile. "Kill yourself a queen today."

"I--" Jake looked back at his book, at the thoughts fighting for space on the page. He had it. He just had to put it into words.

"She used stories, because stories are... they're levers. Into how people think."

Will sat down on the bed again and picked up the jewelry box from where he'd left it. "Go on."

"The villagers... they did the work. She just sent out a call, for anything to do her bidding. The magic flowed into the town, and it became a story... it became many stories, unlocking the villagers' fears and stealing their girls and feeding on them even as the queen prepared to feed on the girls in the crypts..." Jake knew it, he knew it in his bones that this was right. That it was all leading to something that he and Will could do.

_"I remember this story, from my childhood."_

_"End the story. This is your world, Jake."_

"What would you do if you found a piece of glass with a beautiful woman's reflection inside, and she spoke to you, promising you anything if you would help her to get out?"

Will snorted. "Crush it under my heel. Why?"

Jake started to smile. "That's what we have to teach an entire world to do, Brother Grimm."

Amazingly enough, Will looked interested. "How do we do that?"

"Give me my pen, find me the address of a publisher, and I'll show you," Jake promised.

{}{}{}

Will went down to the smith to have the box and its contents, no matter how empty, melted down. Jake left him there, watching the box burn. He had a previous obligation.

Angelika was topping up Cavaldi's glass when he entered the house. He'd never had a chance, Jake knew. When Angelika smiled, his whole body lit up.

The happy ending didn't come until later, when Cavaldi and his sweet wife Hester had left, and the young girls had gone to bed, and Will had checked in on them and then excused himself to the tavern, with a smile.

But rest assured, when it finally happened, it was well worth the wait.

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End file.
